L. Paul Bremer and Mistakes in Iraq

I happened to catch L. Paul Bremer on Meet The Press this morning (you can see the video here) as he was discussing his new book My Year in Iraq. While I haven't read the book, I have read some of the excerpts. He claims to harrived there and immediately been struck by the "chaos" of Baghdad, as his first chapter is named. While Donald Rumsfeld back in Washington was disregarding accounts of widespead looting, on the ground, Bremer realized how badly it was hurting us. He asked for more troops to secure things and was turned down by first Rumsfeld and then by the President. Both men say they took his request seriously and discussed it with the military leadership. Andrew Sullivan reacts to this and other Runmsfeld-related things here.

He also places blame for many of our problems in Iraq on the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority placing "too much emphasis on large-scale reconstruction projects. While the urgent need for modern highways, electrical generating plants and the like was clear, we should have anticipated that building them would take a long time," he wrote. "Our earlier efforts should have been directed more tightly at meeting Iraqis' day-to-day needs," he added.

It's a depressing read. The storyline seems clear to me, I fail to see why so many people have trouble grasping it. I could never figure out why people said they were confused by John Kerry's position on Iraq during the campaign. I wasn't. I shared it. Let me try one more time to explain that, and what we should be doing now...in my next post.